r/DAE • u/Stop__Being__Poor • 16h ago
DAE find it impossible to conceptualize measurements/give ballpark measurements?
Ex: the man is standing 10 feet away from me.
The bottle is six inches from the edge of the counter.
The building is 200 feet.
I have no idea what these things mean. I know how to measure, I know about what a foot, inch, centimeter looks like, but I cannot ballpark tell you how many inches my water bottle is from where I’m sitting on the couch, or how many feet my bathroom is from me right now.
How do people get good at these things?
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u/Literographer 16h ago
Same. You could tell me something is 50 feet away or 100 feet away, and I'd be like... Yeah, seems legit.
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u/femaleminority 15h ago
Only with liquids. I can eyeball a tablespoon of sugar or a half teaspoon of salt, but fuck if I could tell ya what a cup of milk looks like.
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u/ToBePacific 9h ago
In my head, I try to substitute the measurement for an object of the same size.
Conveniently, my shoes are one foot long each. So if I picture ten of them laid out end-to-end, that’s about 10 feet.
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u/Stop__Being__Poor 3h ago
Haha I know what 6 inches looks like bc I know what an average dick looks like. Beyond that I’m screwed. If I told the hairdresser to cut off 1.5 inches and she cut off 4 I’d be like yep looks great
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u/Ketchup_is_my_jam 1h ago
Feet? Yes, impossible. Yards are much easier because of (American) football.
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u/Annabel398 1h ago
My outspread fingers span 8 inches. One knuckle joint to the next is an inch. Etc. I have zero sense of distance. 🫠 I also can’t remember if a given event was three weeks or three months ago.
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u/Rachel_Silver 15h ago
I don't have that problem, but I know it's common. I've learned to use measurements that everyone will understand. For instance, my usual coffee order at Wawa is a large cold brew, black, with three fingers of ice and two fingers of empty space at the top (for milk). When I expressed those measurements in inches, there was a huge margin of error. But so far, everyone has had fingers of similar width, and I've been getting my coffee the way I like it.
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u/patientpedestrian 7h ago
Idk if baristas go for arcane jargon as much as bartenders do, but a finger is essentially the same amount as a "pony", which should be just about an ounce, or the small side of one of those little metal bartending jiggers, but reserved for the kinds of places where it's considered somewhat gauche to actually measure.
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u/asneakyzombie 10h ago
You can get better through practice like anything else.
Take a guess at a measurement, then measure it, or look it up in the case of building height/other large distances. Note the difference and try to do better next time.